The Tears of the King
Introduction: A Jarring Sorrow
The scene is one of triumph. Just moments before our text, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice. They were shouting, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord; Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" This is the Triumphal Entry. The crowds are ecstatic. The Pharisees are scolding. The air is electric with messianic expectation. And right in the middle of this celebration, the guest of honor, the King Himself, stops, looks at His capital city, and breaks down in tears. He wept. He cried aloud.
This is a jarring and dissonant moment. It is like a groom weeping at the altar, not with joy, but with profound grief. It is the victorious general sobbing as he enters the city he has just liberated. Why is Jesus weeping? The modern, sentimental view of Christ would have us believe these are the tears of a frustrated idealist, a gentle teacher whose message of love was sadly misunderstood. But this is a profound misreading of the text and a gross underestimation of the man. These are not the tears of impotence. These are the tears of a righteous judge, a covenant Lord, a spurned King who sees the terrible, inexorable, and fully deserved doom that is about to fall upon His rebellious people. He is not weeping because He is helpless to stop it; He is weeping because their rebellion has made it necessary. These are the tears of judgment.
What we have here is not a therapy session, but a courtroom scene. The King has arrived at His capital city to inspect it, to visit it. And this visitation is not a social call. It is a final inspection before the condemnation is pronounced. Jerusalem was the covenant city of the Great King, and she had played the harlot. The King had come to claim His bride, and she had locked the doors and posted guards. His tears are the expression of a holy sorrow over a judgment that is now unavoidable because the day of grace has been squandered.
The Text
And as He approached Jerusalem and saw the city, He cried over it, saying, “If you knew in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.”
(Luke 19:41-44 LSB)
The Rejected Peace (v. 41-42)
We begin with the King's lament.
"And as He approached Jerusalem and saw the city, He cried over it, saying, 'If you knew in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes.'" (Luke 19:41-42 LSB)
Jesus weeps aloud. This is not a silent tear rolling down his cheek. The Greek word here implies loud crying, a wail of grief. And his words are a cry of frustrated longing, a conditional sentence left hanging in the air: "If only you had known..." Known what? "The things which make for peace."
The word for peace here is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew shalom. It does not mean a mere absence of conflict, like some fragile ceasefire. It means comprehensive well being, wholeness, prosperity, and right-relatedness to God. Jerusalem's very name contains this word, shalom. It was meant to be the city of peace. But they had rejected the Prince of Peace who stood before them. They were looking for a political peace, a military peace from the Romans. But true peace, true shalom, only comes through submission to the King. The things that make for peace were not a set of abstract principles; they were embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. Peace is a person, and they were about to crucify Him.
But notice the terrifying conclusion to His lament: "But now they have been hidden from your eyes." This is not just a statement of their ignorance. It is a verdict of judicial blindness. There is a point of no return in rebellion. There comes a time when God, in His righteous judgment, confirms sinners in their chosen path. They loved the darkness, so He gave them darkness. They refused to see, so He blinded their eyes. This is what the apostle Paul talks about in Romans 1, where God "gave them over" to their sins. This is a fearful thing. To have the very source of peace and salvation standing before you, and to be supernaturally blinded to Him, is the very definition of Hell on earth.
The Awful Sentence (v. 43-44a)
From the verdict of blindness, Jesus moves to the pronouncement of the sentence. And it is breathtaking in its specific, military detail.
"For the days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another..." (Luke 19:43-44a LSB)
This is not vague, spiritual language. This is a precise prophecy of a Roman siege. About forty years after Jesus spoke these words, in A.D. 70, the Roman general Titus, son of the Emperor Vespasian, did exactly this. The Jews had risen in a foolhardy rebellion, and the Romans came to crush them. The Jewish historian Josephus, an eyewitness to the event, describes it in horrifying detail. The Romans built a wall of circumvallation, a barricade, around the entire city. They surrounded them and hemmed them in on every side, cutting off all supplies and all escape routes. The resulting famine was so severe that people resorted to cannibalism.
After the siege, the Romans stormed the city and utterly destroyed it. They leveled it to the ground. They slaughtered the inhabitants, including women and children, by the hundreds of thousands. And then, in a methodical and deliberate act of demolition, they dismantled the Temple, prying apart its massive stones to get at the gold that had melted and run between them in the fire. Just as Jesus predicted, they did not leave one stone upon another. This prophecy was fulfilled with a terrifying and literal precision. God's Word does not fail. His warnings are not idle threats. History is the unfolding of His decreed counsel.
The Stated Reason (v. 44b)
Why did this happen? Was it just bad luck? Was it simply the result of Roman military might and Jewish political miscalculation? Jesus gives the ultimate, theological reason in the final clause.
"...because you did not recognize the time of your visitation." (Luke 19:44b LSB)
This is the indictment. This is the grounds for the entire sentence. All of that bloodshed, all of that destruction, all of that horror, boiled down to this one central failure. The word for "visitation" here is episkope. It means an inspection, a visit from a superior to see the state of things. The God of the universe, the Creator of heaven and earth, had condescended to visit His covenant people in the person of His Son. The King had come to His capital. And they failed the inspection. They did not recognize Him. "He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him" (John 1:11).
Their sin was not simply ignorance. It was a willful, culpable failure to recognize their own Messiah. The signs were all there. The prophecies were fulfilled in Him. His works testified to who He was. But they would not have Him to rule over them. They preferred their dead traditions, their political power-plays, and their self-righteousness to the living God in their midst. And so, because they missed the visitation of grace, they would receive a visitation of wrath. The Romans were not the ultimate cause of Jerusalem's fall; they were merely the axe in God's hand (Isaiah 10:15). The ultimate cause was theological. It was covenantal infidelity.
Conclusion: Your Day of Visitation
It is easy for us to read this as a sad story about the Jews two thousand years ago. But to do so is to miss the point entirely. This passage is a permanent warning to all people and all nations in all times. God still conducts His visitations.
He visits nations. He visits them through the preaching of the gospel, through seasons of revival, through the establishment of just laws, and through the blessings of peace and prosperity. And when a nation, like ours, which has been so richly blessed by the light of the gospel, begins to turn its back on that light, when it legalizes the slaughter of the unborn, celebrates sexual perversion, and teaches its children to be ashamed of their heritage, it is failing to recognize the time of its visitation. And the barricades will follow. The judgment will come. The principle is fixed. Rejection of the King leads to ruin.
But the visitation is also personal. Right now, through the reading and preaching of this text, God is visiting you. The King has entered the capital of your heart. He is inspecting what He finds there. He is offering you "the things which make for peace," forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God, and eternal life through His death and resurrection. This is your day. This is the time of your visitation.
How will you respond? Will you, like Jerusalem, be blind to Him? Will you be so preoccupied with your own plans, your own sins, your own kingdom, that you fail to recognize the King of kings? If you do, the result is the same. Your life will be surrounded, hemmed in, and ultimately leveled by the consequences of your rebellion. The peace you seek will be hidden from your eyes.
Or will you do what the disciples in the crowd were doing? Will you cry out, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord"? Will you throw down your coat, which is to say, your own self-righteousness, and welcome Him as Lord and Savior? The tears of the King over Jerusalem are the tears of a judge. But let us not forget that this weeping King was on His way to the cross. He was about to endure the ultimate siege, to be hemmed in by the wrath of God, to be leveled to the ground under the weight of our sin, so that all who recognize Him and trust in Him might find peace. Do not miss the time of your visitation.